Baidu looks to artificial intelligence to reduce insurance risks. Ya-Qin Zhang, president of Baidu, shares this news. He also states his worries about the knock-on effects of AI on human behaviour and information retention. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot. As AI improves search, for example, we’re encouraged to retain less information in our memory because it’s only a query away. This frees up mindshare, but what’s filling that space?

Legendary filmmaker Werner Herzog is producing a documentary, Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World, with topical content on AI. Here’s the trailer.

Political Speech Generation, UMass Amherst. Using a language model for grammar and topic model for textual consistency trained on US congressional floor debate transcripts, the author is able to automatically generate speeches with either a supportive or opposing opinion on a particular topic.

In 2015, $3.06bn was invested into businesses using/developing AI through 328 deals around the world. The peak of activity was in Q3, which accounted for $1.57bn on its own.

55% of the deals were at the Seed/Angel stage (median $890k/deal) and 22.5% at Series A (median $5m/deal), 16% at Series B (median $15m/deal). 50% of the activity was in the US, with YC (11 deals), Techstars (7 deals), Data Collective (6 deals), a16z (5 deals), Khosla (5 deals) and NEA (5 deals) being most active.

There were 43 exits occurring on average 3-4 years since first fundraising (average raised $15.1m prior to exit). Apple, Google and Twitter each acquired 2 businesses.